


even the brokenhearted stars

by Damkianna



Category: Xena: Warrior Princess
Genre: Betrayal, Canonical Character Death, F/F, Gen, Love, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-23
Updated: 2015-04-23
Packaged: 2018-03-19 07:42:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3601887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Damkianna/pseuds/Damkianna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Akemi knows who Xena is well before the warrior princess ever steps over Kao's threshold. (Or—Akemi loves Xena: let her count the ways.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	even the brokenhearted stars

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LittleRaven](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRaven/gifts).



> Thank you so much, LittleRaven, for giving me an excuse to finally write a story in this formative fandom of my heart! I'm crossing my fingers that this doesn't go over the line into "too grim" for you, since it's no worse than canon-compliant and we know everybody gets to meet again in the afterlife and all. (If you suspect that it might be too much, I wrote you a backup gift just in case, so feel free to skip this and read that instead!)
> 
> Other notes: the "canonical character death" tag is for Akemi, though it's more implied than anything. Some violence, but I don't consider it graphic. Historical and cultural accuracy is out the window, because Xena. A translation of the first poem mentioned (the one that's rephrased) can be found [here](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ry%C5%8Dkan), the last one under the Dewdrops on a Lotus Leaf heading; a translation of the second (quoted in its entirety) can be found [here](http://www.japaneselanguageguide.com/culture/monksougi.asp), the second poem on the page.

  


  


Akemi knows who Xena is well before the warrior princess ever steps over Kao's threshold; but she loves her even longer than that.

  


* * *

  


Akemi loves Xena before she even knows Xena's name—before Xena even has a name, in her mind; before Xena is anything other than a shapeless shadow standing somewhere in Akemi's future.

Akemi will have vengeance. This is decided, a truth so fundamental that Akemi would sooner doubt the coming of a new day's sunrise.

(It was not always like this. When Akemi screamed and sobbed over her mother's body, her little brother's, the twins—when she crawled away from the burning remains of the rikyū at last and collapsed in the snow, bleeding—it was only a thought, a helpless wish, as much as it consumed her. It was not until several days had passed, until she had woken, still bloody, and stood on trembling legs, and failed to stop breathing, that it occurred to her: it was truth. Why else would she still be alive? Why else would the universe have contorted itself so that Akemi, stabbed, cut half open, trapped in a burning house, might yet survive? Her father could not have been stopped. No kami could prevent a sword shoved through a woman's heart from killing her, nor keep a child from dying once pinned to the floor and beheaded—but how much easier must it have been, surely, to let Akemi's weak heartbeat go unnoticed beneath the crackling of flames? How much easier, for her father's lazy soldiers to leave the house to burn and call it enough, instead of cutting off all their heads and hands for certainty?

The universe could not stop it; but it will not let her father's crime go unpunished. Just as it will not let Akemi go unpunished, in the end. The balance seeks to right itself, and Akemi is its instrument. Once she perceives this, all things become simpler.)

Akemi will have vengeance—but she cannot achieve it alone, she does not have the skill. She will have to learn the skill, then, which means someone who does have it will need to teach it to her, and that is the moment she understands. There will be someone. Akemi does not know who it will be, does not know what they will look like or what they will say or how long it will take her to find them. But there will be someone, and that someone will give Akemi what she needs so that she will be able to do what she must. How could she fail to love them for it?

There will be someone. Akemi knows this long before she knows that it will be Xena; and Akemi loves this someone who waits for her, this nameless gift of a teacher who will make Akemi's sole purpose possible, with the same fierce certainty with which she knows they will exist.

  


*

  


Akemi thinks for a time that her teacher will perhaps turn out to be one of the guardians of the blessed katana. She cups this thought in her mind's hands, a warming flame, all the way through the mountains, all the way to the enclave where the sword is kept. All the way up to the moment when the master who governs the enclave looks at her with flat disdain. Disdain cannot touch Akemi, not now that she understands her purpose; but no one who would look at her that way can possibly become the teacher she so cherishes. She thinks perhaps she will take the katana from them, then, and find her teacher elsewhere—but they will not even let her touch it, much less tell her anything of how it should be used. She had known women could not own katana, but she had thought perhaps the rules did not apply to the sacred blade—

But they do. Akemi will need to find another way.

This is the moment when it first occurs to her that perhaps her beloved future teacher is a foreigner—someone to whom these kinds of rules are not law, who cannot be expected or forced to respect them and therefore will not be bound by them the way Akemi is. It seems more likely the more she considers it: someone who does not fear her father, someone who will not listen to the guardians of the sacred sword. Where else will she find these things except in a stranger who has never before set foot on the shores of Jappa?

Abruptly her love, true and deep already, acquires an entirely new breadth. Someone who does not fear her father—this idea is breathlessly satisfying. Someone who does not even know his name, who has never been cowed by the tales of his cruelty and paranoia; someone to whom he and all his works mean _nothing_.

(And, even more than this: a foreigner. A traveler, Akemi thinks. Someone who has seen many lands, who wishes to see even more—why else would they ever come to Jappa? Someone from far away, to whom the rules do not apply, who is not and has never been confined by their weight as Akemi is. What will such a person be like? The moment Akemi asks this question is the first moment she is aware of _wanting_ to know. Her love has been steady, abiding; and it is still, it always will be, but now it is no longer so abstract. Now it is— _eager_ , eager and curious and glad.)

She wonders when they will get to Jappa, how and why they will come and where they will arrive; she stays close to the coast, self-indulgently, even though there is no hurrying fate. And then the pirates of the western sea raid Chiyoryo and take her, and she stops wondering. It makes sense now. They will not come to Jappa—she will go to them.

She considers then whether it is one of the pirates, but decides quickly that it is not. They are thugs, thieves, criminals. Oh, some of them are clever, one or two exceptional in other ways, but Akemi watches them kill and loot and burn many times over the following months, and they are not true warriors. None of them could ever kill her father, and so none of them can teach her what she needs to know to do it herself.

Then they trade her to Kao, who takes one look at Akemi's robes and hair, the way she holds herself, and decides she can be ransomed. She thinks even more briefly that it could be Kao, who is a warrior—or at least more of one than the pirates—and does not care about rules, who is from Qin and does not know enough about Akemi's father to understand that there will be no ransom. But Kao is petty, small-minded, grasping. His body is strong, perhaps, but not his heart, not his will. It is not him either, Akemi decides. It does not matter. She will find her teacher anyway, sooner or later.

  


*

  


The first time Akemi hears Xena's name, she thinks little of it except that it is pretty. She has a scroll of rice paper and a brush—there is little for her to do in Kao's fortress except practice her brushwork—and when the name drifts into the room from the hallway, Kao and one of his men passing by, she hears it and thinks _pretty_ , thinks _but how to write it—?_ Ji-na is the best she would ever be able to do. Calligraphy can do so much, _express_ so much, and yet rendering this pretty name with true precision lies beyond its reach, outside the bounds of its rules.

(Someone to whom the rules do not apply, Akemi will think later, and she will laugh at her own inattention. Even then, her heart was trying to tell her what it already knew.)

Except she begins to hear the name again and again, within the confines of Kao's halls; and the more times she hears it, the more she learns. Only snatches, at first: Xena—Xena and Borias—warlord—warrior woman—warrior princess. This phrase catches in Akemi's imagination. _Warrior princess_ —what a thing to be! What sort of woman is it who can earn such a title, who can be called by it so earnestly by the kind of men Kao employs? Akemi sets aside her most recent calligraphic scroll and begins a new one, on a piece of paper that is the right size for four large bold characters, one particle. _Warrior princess_.

(It is the first piece of calligraphy she has done since she came to understand her purpose that does not have one variant or another of "death" in it somewhere. There is no better way to come to terms with what waits for her than to learn it backwards and forwards, to treat it like art and thereby find the beauty in it; but she finds herself liking the way "warrior princess" looks without it.)

And then Kao comes to her one day and tells her: Xena is in Qin. Xena is a great warrior woman, never happy except when she is leading a vast army—but armies require pay, require armor and weapons and other things that cost money. Akemi's father is so slow to pay Kao; _Xena_ will pay, though, for the prospect of more gold later, and it is not Kao's business whether she ever gets it. "At least I will get _something_ for my trouble," he snarls, annoyed.

"You will get all that you deserve," Akemi tells him, not looking up, dragging her brush across the paper before her.

"Useless wench," Kao rages, and strikes her across the face.

It is easy to see coming—it always is, when Kao strikes out in anger. Akemi allows the blow to fall where it will, and is careful not to let her brush drip.

"What is this life but an echo, fading away into empty sky?" It is a paraphrase of a poem Akemi's mother had loved—but Kao can barely read, and is not a philosophical man in any case. He does not understand the allusion, nor even the bare metaphor when it is stripped of context; he thinks she is mad, or else taunting him, when all she is doing is answering. _Useless, you call me—but what, then, is useful? Are you truly any more useful than I, when we will all soon enough be dust in the wind?_

"Be silent," Kao says, and shakes her once, sharply, before shoving her away. "I will be glad when that devil-woman comes and takes you away."

And that—that is the moment when Akemi realizes that perhaps it is this Xena she has been waiting for.

  


*

  


So: Akemi loves Xena before she ever sees Xena's face. She loves Xena with the fierce persistence with which she loves the teacher who is coming to guide her hands; and with the wonder and curiosity with which she loves the foreigner who will sweep aside all the rules Akemi cannot break; and, too, with a tentative seedling love that belongs to Xena alone: Xena, whose name and title are beautiful in ways that death is not, who is a warrior and a princess and a devil-woman.

And then—then Xena comes to Kao's fortress, with tall dark Borias at her shoulder, and Akemi kneels and says her name and title and waits. She should be nervous, trembling, but her heart in that moment is a still lake, calm and smooth and clear.

The toe of Xena's boot bumps Akemi's chin; and Akemi follows its steering touch and looks up into Xena's face, and loves her all anew.

The truth spills out of Akemi like blood, like gleaming water gushing from her lake-heart: Xena _is_ afraid of nothing, and Kao _is_ afraid of many things, and Xena will not let Kao touch Akemi, not anymore. (She tells the truth, too, when she says Xena will love her: what Xena will do for Akemi is the greatest gift Akemi will ever receive, and who would give so vast a gift except to someone beloved?) Xena is everything Akemi imagined her cherished teacher would be, and at the same time more, more than Akemi could ever even have thought to dream of. She kills Kao with a touch of her fingers—her _fingers_ —and her smile is like sunlight, her eyes a different poem entirely—

 _Ah! for coolness,_  
_it rivals the water's depth,_  
_this autumn sky._

—and she fights like no one Akemi has ever seen. For a moment, Akemi almost doubts: why would this woman teach Akemi anything? Who could ever have hurt her in any way that would matter—how could she ever understand? But Xena crouches, sneers at Kao's quaking body and then looks at Akemi, and something in her face changes for a moment, flickers there just long enough for Akemi to see it and think: she will understand. Not now, no. She does not know anything (and perhaps it is best that way; perhaps it should stay that way, until the very last moment). But later, when it matters—she will understand.

Akemi holds out her hand; and Xena takes it, and Akemi loves her for it.

  


* * *

  


Akemi knows the moment Xena kills Kao that it is this trick of the fingers she must learn. Akemi's father is a great warlord, a skilled swordsman, and it would take years and years for Akemi to learn to match him in that—if it could be done at all, when Akemi's hands have always preferred the handle of a brush.

(If Akemi sometimes thinks of what it would be like, in a world where Xena had strangled Kao or lopped his head from his shoulders—where Akemi had no choice but to let it take years, to learn the sword at Xena's hands one step at a time, to stand by Xena's side each day and lie down with her each night—

If Akemi sometimes thinks of what that would be like, that is between her and her brush. She does not show Xena every piece of poetry she writes.)

But this trick of the fingers: this, she can learn quickly. This, her father will have no defense against, as Akemi's mother and brothers, sisters, grandparents, had no defense against her father's soldiers. He will pay the price for what he has done, at Akemi's hands—and then Akemi will pay her own price at Xena's, and that is as it should be.

  


*

  


This is what Akemi did not expect: to love Xena so easily. She owes her love to the wise teacher; she grants it to the bold foreigner; she gives it away to the warrior with the deadly hands and sky-water eyes. But it is stolen from her by the woman who listens to the kami with such skill but does not know how to gracefully accept the gift of a poem—who tells Akemi to trust no one and then follows Akemi so readily south, unquestioning.

Akemi hardly needs to think to follow the path to the ruins of the rikyū where her family had been lodged (where her father bade them stay—just for a little while, promising he would come to them—that the bad days were over, that he loved his sons, treasured his daughters—and what could her mother have said? She could only have bowed, pressed her face to the floor and prayed he was not lying—). By the time the little shrine comes into view, Akemi is far away, watching herself approach as though through another's eyes, and Xena—

Xena growls and snaps, anger welling up—and then subsiding just as quickly, the moment Akemi bares her neck. Xena lowers her sword and listens, and Akemi is breathless for a moment with pride, delight, a sudden sharp fondness. How many thousands of men have failed to do what Akemi does by sweeping aside her hair? And Xena _lets_ her—could swing, but does not, and by not doing so, surrenders. Xena's code of honor, of saving face, is so different from the one that governs Akemi, but Akemi has learned this much about it: it says surrender is vulnerability. Xena permits herself to be vulnerable where Akemi can see her. From a woman like Xena, who has led the life Xena has led, can there be any greater profession of love?

So Akemi loves Xena like this, too: for the times when she is vulnerable and the times when she is not. For the certainty she shows when she claims the sacred blade and breaks a hundred rules at once; for the tentativeness in her gaze when Akemi calls her _kind_ , _wise_ , _my teacher_. Xena could kill Akemi whenever she likes, with her bare hands, and yet at times Akemi feels herself the stronger. She had expected to be awed, amazed, humbled, and she is—but she had not expected that she would also feel protective.

(The moment Akemi thinks this is the moment it first occurs to her that what she will do, what she will ask Xena to do, will hurt Xena. It changes nothing—how can it? The balance seeks to right itself, and Akemi is its instrument. This is truth, and there can be no resistance, no refusal. It is only that now—

Now Akemi looks ahead, toward the inevitability of her purpose, and sees that she will feel not only triumph, not only satisfaction, but also regret.)

  


* * *

  


A sacred trust. Akemi likes that. It _feels_ sacred, this thing that has bloomed between her and Xena; and it _is_ trust, Akemi has no doubt of that. She sees the look on Xena's face when Xena agrees at last to teach her this "pinch"—it is a powerful thing, and terrible, enough to make Xena hesitate, but Xena teaches it to Akemi anyway. And the way she teaches it: pressing Akemi's fingers to her own throat, watching Akemi with those clear sky-water eyes even as blood begins to trickle from her nose, one ear—

This is Xena's hair pulled aside, Akemi thinks, Xena's bared neck; and she is glad to lower her sword in her turn, to undo the pinch and move her hands away.

She wipes the blood from Xena's face and neck, after, and then she looks at Xena's blood on her silk sleeves. A sacred trust Akemi has already betrayed—had betrayed before she ever even learned Xena's name. She told the truth: she _is_ honored, beyond all words; honored and proven dishonorable through the same act, just as she loves Xena and betrays Xena with the same heart.

Balance, Akemi thinks, and does not falter.

  


*

  


_And then you go and save my life,_ she told Xena once. _There is no greater gift of love a teacher can give a student than that._

What she does not say, what she never says: _and then I go and bow my head beneath your sword—and then I go and put my ashes in your hands—and then I go and put my spirit in your keeping—_

Not gifts a student gives a teacher; but there are no greater gifts of love Akemi has to give than these. She shoves the tantō into herself as far as it will go, and leaves the dispensation of all that remains of her to the judgment of the one person left who has cause to seek revenge against her. Foolishness—sacred trust. Desperation—love. She wonders which of these Xena will decide it is.

(Akemi does not have to decide. Akemi knows.)

She closes her eyes, and waits for the blade to fall.


End file.
